SonosSharp, a new beginning

Since I bought my first Sonos equipment piece, the Playbar, I’ve been intrigued by the system. It’s so simple to set up and use, and the apps (on Android, iOS and Windows) are a breeze to work with.

At the time of writing, there is no official Sonos app for Windows Phone (although one is apparently in the works). This led me to developing a Windows Phone app that does some of the basics such as controlling volume, mainly as a learning opportunity.

A lot has changed since then, .NET is going cross-platform & open-source, Windows 10 is coming with windowed Metro/Modern/Universal apps. Lately I’ve also been learning about Reactive Extensions, and have fallen in love with it.

This lead me to reinvent SonosSharp, which was previously just a dump of the library I wrote for my Windows Phone app. I’ll be starting with a clean sheet, and will be heavily focusing on ease-of-use of the library. In the following blog posts I’ll describe my process as I go along. The big objectives are:

Must be super easy to use, yet allow for more complex scenario’s such as eventing (more on that in another post)

Cross-platform, make it work on Windows, Linux, OSX, mobile platforms

Think about performance as a feature, but also keep the memory under control (memory pooling)

Create a sample app/console application as a showcase

And of course, develop it all in the open, on Github

I strive to not let this be another one of my side-projects, as illustrated brilliantly in this commit strip.